Page 3 of F*ck Marriage

Ialways feel most at home here because New York is me: my soul city. Neither of us knows how to sleep, for instance. And there is the fact that we make people from small towns feel uncomfortable.

I peer out the window as the cab veers left then right, swerving at the last minute to take the exit. It’s the type of erratic cab driving that tourists bemoan for years after visiting.Oh my God, you wouldn’t believe how they drive in the city…

In my expert opinion, you haven’t truly experienced New York until you’ve thought you were going to die during a cab ride. My hair, a tangled mess after the red-eye I took, hits me in the face as the wind from the open window zigzags through the car. My cabbie is a nice man named Frank who has three snake tattoos. He stops in front of a building on Fifth Avenue and hooks his arm across the back of the seat to look at me.

“You gonna be okay? You’re the color of my Aunt Bee’s pea soup.”

“Word,” I say. “You should see what my insides look like.”

“That bad, huh?”

I eye the cigarette propped behind his ear.

“Can I smell your cigarette?”

He plucks it from its resting spot and hands it to me without comment. Lifting it to my nose, I sniff.

“Okay,” I say, handing it back. “Better.”

When I step out, my entire body is tingling in anticipation. I flex my fingers and stare up at the building, while Frank retrieves my bag from the trunk. All of a sudden, I feel foolish for ever leaving New York. This is the place I love. Jules, my friend since college, has taken a job in Brazil for a year. She’s letting me stay in her apartment until I get back on my feet. That means I have exactly a year to figure things out; if I can’t reverse what I’ve done in a year, I’ll gladly skulk back to Washington. The apartment is on the third floor, and after I pay my fare, I haul my meager suitcase up the stairs. The keyring Jules mailed me bites into my sweating palm. I know this city, I love this city, and yet my hands are trembling as I turn the key and push open the door. Relief kicks in as soon as I step inside. It’s not the spacious one and a half bedrooms, or the hardwood floors, or even the impressive collection of thrifted furniture that I’m happy to see. It’s the fact that I made it back, that I came back after what happened. I didn’t let the hurt swallow me whole. Just thinking about the hurt makes me hurt, so I busy myself with looking around.

Jules had a cleaning company come in; I smell wood polish and bleach. I walk around the apartment touching the spines of her books, the carved wooden wings that sit on the coffee table, like an invisible angel ready to take off. I can’t believe I’m here.

Ispend my first morning back unpacking the few things I brought, examining the excellent light that trickles through the blinds making everything glow honey warm, and examining the contents of Jules’ pantry—which is mostly empty except for a few cans of creamed corn and green beans. I find the coffee—a bag of somethin’ somethin’ from a shop uptown, the name of the beans handwritten in marker on the indigo blue bag. Jules has a very fancy coffee machine. She’s taped instructions on how to use it on the counter. I stare at her instructions for a few minutes, my palms sweating at the responsibility. Espresso machines are for grown-ups, not girls like me who have never even owned a Keurig. In Port Townsend, I did the smart thing and walked to a coffee shop for my morning joe.

To my extreme delight, there are several coffee shops in the neighborhood. I try the closest one first, a place called Crunchy that has a cat sitting in the window. I smile wanly at the barista when he hands me my recycled cup, my new name scratched on the side in hot-pink Sharpie.Yes! Yes! Yes!That’s me, Wendy from New York! I’m uptown, and I wear a size four, and no man would dare cheat on a woman with such magnificent mermaid hair.

I spend the afternoon shopping for supplies. Instead of a chain grocery store, I peruse a little sidewalk farmers market, plucking vegetables from baskets. In the evening, so as not to break the schedule I’ve been keeping, I pull on my Nikes and go for a run. And then, when the day is over, in the crisp sheets of someone else’s bed, I curl up and cry. It’s a very Billie thing to do, but oh well, no one can see me anyway. Tomorrow it’s back to being Wendy.

The next morning I check my emails on my beat-up old laptop. It won’t even turn on unless it’s plugged in, and I tap my fingers on the counter while I wait for the screen to load. I’d given Woods a little consideration and sent him an email before I left Washington, informing him that I was moving back to the city. He’d responded right away, it was nice. He welcomed me back and asked if I’d be staying in our old loft. I never answered him. I’d put up an ad on Craigslist about the loft and had twenty messages within the first day. I’d chosen a guy in his thirties who was serious about his career and worked in finance. I figured he was less likely to have wild parties in the event that he would be working all the time. All that’s left to do is pick up a box of things the cleaning company set aside and hand him his keys. In my rattiest jeans and an old Pearl Jam shirt, I set out for my favorite street in SoHo. It’s nearly impossible to avoid painful memories in a city you spent ten years living in, but I try anyway, taking the long way around the places where my ex-husband and I spent a lot of our time. The gym, for example—I can’t say I loved going, but Woods and I would trek there three times a week, holding hands, gym bags slung over our shoulders. It was part of our daily lives, a monotony that I appreciated at the time. I’ve found that the small moments hurt more than the big ones. The juice bar on Spring Street where we’d stop for breakfast on the way to the office, trying each other’s drinks and laughing when we always liked the other person's better. The movie theater we went to on 181st, because it had the best popcorn and fizziest Diet Coke. All places that Woods and I shared the most intimate moments, moments that solidified my love for him and our life together. Seeing them ignites a hurt that I wrestle down to a smoldering level. Barely.

The loft is painfully empty when I step inside. My shoes echo on the wood floors; I like the sound because it reminds me of my hollow insides. Washed and scrubbed and dusted of our memories, the loft is barely recognizable. I choke out a laugh, because I laugh when I feel awkward, and I feel hella awkward in the home I shared with my first love. It smells the same and that’s what makes me tremble. I try to shake it off, reminding myself that it’s been two years.Two!I say forcefully to myself. When we’d moved in, Woods had commented on how it smelled like baby powder. I’d scrunched up my nose and agreed, hoping he wouldn’t get any ideas. Babies were not on my radar ... yet. We never could figure out where the smell came from, though on several occasions our friends made mention of it too. I do a quick walk-through, trying to breathe through my mouth, my tennis shoes sweating on the freshly polished floors. Nights drinking red wine in front of our view; Saturday mornings scrambling eggs at the stove, Billie Holiday playing on the stereo. A fight we had about the bathroom paint color that ended in a smashed bottle of perfume and both of us laughing hysterically. Heavy, happy memories that make me swell and deflate at the same time. I thought he loved me, but I was wrong. By the time I make it back to the kitchen dragging the memories behind me like deflated balloons, my new tenant is buzzing through the intercom. I scoop up the box the cleaning people left for me and meet him at the door.

Farewell, goodbye, adios, fuck you!I think.

Chapter Four

Pearl Lajolla is five years my junior. Five years; it doesn’t feel like much, but it is. Five years means fewer wrinkles—probably right around the eyes and mouth—perkier tits, and more innocence. The innocence is the worst part. Men, especially Woods, are drawn to that shit. They act like they’re not the ones who’ve made us jaded in the first place, and then punish us for having battle wounds by leaving us for someone they haven’t fucked up yet. Pearl—was she truly innocent or just feigning? Who knows. There’s a line Shakespeare wrote inA Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” That was the first thing that came to mind when all five feet of her walked into the Rhubarb office the day I hired her on the spot. She was there in response to an ad I’d placed in theNew York Times. I’d put the ad in the paper because I liked the old-fashioned quaintness of it. Woods made fun of me—a hundred job sites on the Internet and you take an ad out in the paper!Newsflash, Woods:newspaperis not a dirty word, it’s just slightly antiquated.

The ad went like this: Open-minded blogger needed for an up-and-coming brand! Must love fashion, food, and fun!!

I cringe now at the wording, but my younger, untarnished self had been hopeful and apparently grandly enthusiastic.

Pearl had been wearing too much of everything when she walked through the doors for her interview: jewelry, makeup, perfume ... eagerness. But underneath the heavily made-up face and the heady smell of Chanel was a woman who never missed a thing. She was pretty except you didn’t notice it right away. What you noticed first was the tiny-ness of her, and then the large expressive eyes that were always watching. Her pretty came secondary to her expressions, which were often comical. In that first meeting, she wore her hair pulled back in an impressively large bun. Her hair was a rich auburn that I imagined unfurled to her waist. Within two minutes, she confessed that she was a huge fan of the blog and hadn’t happened upon the ad I’d put in the paper by chance. She’d beenwaitingfor it, she said. Pearl had a friend at theNew York Timeswho worked in classifieds. When she saw my ad, she called Pearl immediately. She told me all of this with the same lack of shame I’d seen on her face after I found out she was sleeping with my husband. Consequently, it was that very lack of apology that made me hire her in the first place. She was a go-getter and the no-excuse way she moved through life was her biggest asset. I’d shared a lot of myself with her that first year. She’d been eager to learn. An easy friend, she seemed to have had my back. But she only had it so she could stab it.

The bar where I’m meeting Woods is more of a dive than one of the trendy drinking spots in Manhattan. I hail a cab instead of walking the seven blocks and slide into the backseat, relieved that the cabbie is blasting the air conditioning. I have to start using the subway if I want my money to last.Just this one time, I tell myself. Small, dangerous luxuries. I call out the address as he almost kills us with his extra terrible driving.

“You’re super bad at this,” I call out to him.

But my voice is drowned out by the motorcycle that passes us. God, I love this city: I love this cab, and the subtle danger I’m always in just by living here. I lean my head against the seat and close my eyes. The cab jerks left and I’m thrown into the door. Outside the car is a cacophony of honking. I don’t even bother to open my eyes. If I die, I die in New York. I’m okay with that. Ten minutes later, we make it to the bar and I slide out of the car, groggy. The cabbie calls after me—I forgot to pay him. Shoving a twenty in his hand I offer a meek apology. He speeds off without responding, and I walk unsteadily toward the bar. Woods used to accuse me of being too distracted with life to remember to do basic tasks like pay the cabbie or push the button in the elevator. He did those things, and I suppose I’m only getting worse at not doing them as I age. I push through the bar door and scan the room for a table. I need to be in just the right spot to hold the upper hand.

Ilick the sweat from above my lip and shift in the stool, fanning myself with the sticky laminate menu. Woods is late. I expected as much, but as I glance nervously around the bar, I wish I’d planned to arrive late rather than trying to be here on time. Who knows when he’ll actually show up. He has a knack for either being too early or embarrassingly late. Since he isn’t here yet, I assume it will be the latter. When the bartender makes his way over, I order a lemon drop. My throat can already feel the vodka. I purse my lips and order two.

“So I don’t have to bother you for another,” I tell him.

“Another is our specialty,” he says. “We’re a bar not a gym.”

I’m really soaking in that comeback when my phone pings. Woods telling me he’s going to be late when he’s already late.

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